Chew on This

Sure, we’re about to vote on fluoride, but also on issues about kids and open spaces. Here are WW’s endorsements for the May 21 ballot.

Many election battles vow an eye for an eye. But this spring’s fight is something even fiercer: a tooth for a tooth.

This off-year
election—held in a season when voters might be understandably more
interested in road-tripping than ballot-marking—has instead been as
nasty as any in recent memory.

That’s thanks to one issue: fluoride.

It’s not the first
time the city has been yanked to the ballot box by the question of an
enamel-strengthening chemical in the Bull Run water supply. Portland
rejected fluoride in 1956, 1962 and 1980.

But this most recent
try has touched a nerve in our citizenry, a civic root canal minus the
Novocain. The pro- and anti-fluoridation campaigns are drilling down to
tender spots: racial inequity in unassailably liberal Portland, a
growing cynicism about scientific or any other authority, and the
balance between the good of the commonwealth and the petty tyranny of a
nanny state.

Maybe the furor over
fluoride is just one more quirk in a city full of them—a symptom of the
iconoclasm that makes Portland both sincere and infuriating.

But we’d like to
think it speaks to something better in the city, a willingness to engage
in fierce debate where other places mindlessly check a box.

So we invite you to
consider not just fluoride but other issues that call for your attention
in the May 21 vote: how the city helps its children, how regional
government maintains its open spaces, and who should lead our public
education system.